Cuteness Engineering Designing Adorable Products and Services

Masaaki Kurosu is a Professor Emeritus at the Open University of Japan, since 2017 and is an Emeritus President of HCD-Net after working as a President for 10 years. He was a professor at the Open University of Japan for 2009-2017 and was a professor at NIME for 2001-2009, a professor at Shizuoka University for 1996-2001. He was formerly working for Hitachi Ltd. at the Design Center and the Central Research Laboratory for 1978-1996. He proposed the concept of User Engineering, AET (Artifact Evolution Theory), ERM (Experience Recollection Method) and other usability/UX-related methods and concepts.

Xiaojuan Ma is an assistant professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Initiative in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Princeton University. Before joining HKUST, she was a post-doc at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, a research fellow in the National University of Singapore, and a researcher at Huawei Noah's Ark Lab. Her background is in Human-Computer Interaction. She is particularly interested in multimodal affective computing in the domain of ubiquitous, social, and crowd computing and Human-Robot Interaction.

Ayako Hashizume is an assistant professor at the Tokyo Metropolitan University since 2012. Her research interests include psychology of emotion and Kansei, engineering in relation to Human Centered Design and UX (user experience).  She was awarded the kids design prospective competition 2008 from the Japan Kids Design Association, the best design prize at the design marathon 2009 from the International Association for Universal Design and the research prize 2013 from the Funai Foundation for Information Technology.  She is a chief of the SIG-Kansei of HCD-Net. She received her Ph.D. in Kansei Science from Tsukuba University, Japan, in 2011.